Choosing between two top-tier candidates can be a challenging decision. When both candidates have great resumes, well-written cover letters, and excellent test scores, how do you choose? Both candidates likely possess impressive qualifications and skills, making it difficult to determine who would be the best fit for the position.
But when onboarding the right candidate, the stakes couldn't be higher.
In such cases, it can be helpful to consider certain tiebreakers that can help you make more informed decisions and create a positive employee experience. Top-tier talent is hard to come by. Not to mention that recruiting top-tier talent can be an even bigger challenge when it comes to hiring for leadership roles for mid-size businesses.
That’s why, regardless of the hiring decision made, it’s important to deliver a good interview experience to both top-tier candidates. This way, the other candidate will still want to consider your organization and apply for future openings and opportunities. Prospective employees may consider this experience reflective of what the work environment and employee experience at your company looks like. Let’s explore some ultimate tiebreakers that can assist you in choosing between two top-tier candidates and how to deliver a great interview experience in the process.
Hiring Top Talent: How to Choose Between Two Candidates
When it comes down to two top-tier candidates, here are things you might want to hire for:
1. Employee Experience Meets Culture and Team Addition
While employee experience is extremely important when hiring a new member of your team, it’s also great to find the best employees to elevate the overall work culture.
Culture fit is incredibly important to ensure that both current employees and new employees have great employee experiences. You want to hire a candidate who aligns with your organization’s values, elevates the culture and contributes to the employee experience strategy. Consider their attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors to determine if they would be a good fit within the organization by asking behavioral questions.
However, you also want to make sure you are not repeatedly hiring the same kind of candidate. When you do, your workforce lacks diversity. This can put your professional development at risk due to a less diverse workforce.
Instead, hire a new employee for culture add. When you hire based on culture fit, you may end up with a very homogenous workforce and some unintended, unconscious bias in the hiring process and employee journey.
To avoid this, ask yourself these key questions:
- What does a potential candidate bring to the table in terms of culture?
- Can they build, improve, or streamline processes in your team? What is their energy like?
- Do they have skills that other current team members or business leaders lack?
- While their values align with the company’s, do they bring additional value to the work that they do and to the company’s culture?
The bottom line is: how can they contribute to the team, business success and organization?
Truly assess how well each candidate would fit within the existing team dynamics. Look for candidates who have a history of building strong relationships and fostering a positive team environment. What happens when they run into a conflict with a colleague? How did they solve problems on a tight deadline that required team collaboration? Consider their communication style, collaboration skills, and ability to work well with others. You can do this by asking behavioral questions.
To diversify your workforce and culture, all while enhancing overall employee engagement, you can also add a personality assessment to the interview process. There are many personality tests, but the most popular ones are DiSC and PSIU. These tests offer insight into your candidate’s work style and how they may work in a team – use organizational science to make your best hire!
To differentiate between two top-tier talents, you can also see how they mesh with the rest of the team by setting up an interview or a trial (and paid) work day. You want to build a strong team and culture, so make sure that your hiring decision is a culture add.
2. Professional and Relevant Experience
When you are recruiting top-tier talent, it’s important to evaluate not just their professional experience, but their relevant experience too. Out of your two top-tier candidates, who has the most relevant experience to support the goals and growth of your organization?
Consider specific skills and knowledge required for the position. When both candidates have met and exceeded the minimum requirements for the role, you could consider if one candidate has handled similar responsibilities or projects in a previous role, or has more knowledge about the current industry. Do their skills transfer over easily if they are coming in from another industry?
More importantly, what are the goals of your team and overall organization? For example, you may have two strong candidates for a Content Marketing Specialist position. However, one candidate has more experience in SEO blog writing and the other has additional experience in digital advertising. Is your marketing team looking to produce organic, SEO blog content to increase website traffic or to focus on ads to promote events and products? How does this goal align with sales?
Think similarly, when it comes to hiring software developers. What coding languages are required? What products have they previously worked on? Do they have coding in additional languages that may come in handy in the near future? Does working in a certain timezone matter?
It is important to remember what the organization’s goals are when it comes to making a hiring decision. Hire the candidate who has professional and relevant experience to support the team and organization’s long-term growth. This also helps to regulate unconscious bias in the hiring process.
3. Leadership Experience
Whether you are hiring for a leadership role or not, it is wise to assess the candidates' leadership experience. When you hire for leadership, you are making a strategic decision to hire for the long run. Employees may not immediately be hired for leadership roles but can be promoted into them in the future.
This saves your team from hiring externally and getting external hires up to date with the organization. Plus, it’s hard to attract top-tier leadership talent on a tight budget. Internal promotions are also great for career development programs in your organization. This is something you can promote when you are interviewing top-tier candidates.
Moreover, when you hire for leadership, teams are more dynamic. Team members tend to take more initiative and want to contribute to see the impact of their work. Natural leaders are great to have in any position and contribute to employee experience in a positive way.
Consider their track record of managing teams, leading projects, and making strategic decisions. What was their role and what impact did they have? Did they learn quickly from their mistakes? Look for candidates who have a proven ability to motivate and inspire others. You can also determine who has demonstrated strong leadership skills by asking behavioural questions. This takes out unconscious bias in the hiring process.
4. Soft Skills and Overall Business Performance
We’ve touched on communication skills, but here’s more on how to evaluate soft skills. Soft skills are crucial to consider when it comes to choosing between two top-tier talents. Soft skills are essential in determining how a candidate will work with others, influence their team, and further their career.
What are some soft skills you should consider? Communication skills, both verbal and written, should be at the top of the list. Consider your candidates’ ability to articulate ideas clearly, listen actively, and adapt their communication style to different audiences. This is important when it comes to internal and external collaborations – and for the simple things, like keeping it short and sweet but hitting it on the nail in emails.
Depending on their role, you also want to make sure their communication skills are suited for a leadership role, a customer service role, or a marketing role. In the leadership role, for example, the candidate will be speaking more to the leadership team within and beyond the organization. Do they have experience in that? In both of these roles, different communication skills are needed and it’s good to have an understanding of where this candidate fits in or meets the requirements.
Regardless of the position, you should look for candidates who can effectively convey information and build rapport with colleagues and clients. Other soft skills to consider include creativity, self-awareness, empathy, integrity, problem-solving, accountability, and overall business performance.
Is this candidate innovative? How will they contribute to brainstorms? Do they take responsibility? Colleagues are human too, how can they relate to colleagues beyond the scope of work?
Most importantly, how do they handle challenges? Consider their analytical thinking, creativity, and ability to make sound decisions under pressure. Look for candidates who can identify and address problems efficiently and effectively.
When you evaluate candidates based on their soft skills, one may stand out more than the other. Soft skills are incredibly important to assess, because this affects team dynamics. They also regulate bias in the hiring process.
5. Additional Projects or Tests
Aced a test? Tests are important in assessing skills in action. If you’ve already given a test, offer another project or test to see and envision how candidates may operate in your organization in real life. At this point, you may want to pay them for their time.
Require additional projects or tests with intention and purpose – candidates are busy people too. Think carefully about what else you want to assess. Alternatively, as suggested above, you could also have a trial work day to see how they solve problems on the spot. Again, you may want to pay them for their time if you want to make this a part of your hiring process.
Other Things to Consider to Regulate Unconscious Bias
When it comes to hiring, bias is a big topic of discussion. We’ve discussed how to regulate bias in the hiring process. Other ways to regulate unconscious bias include:
Have an Interview Structure
Structured interviews make it easier to fairly compare applicants’ eligibility for the role. Although an unstructured one is tempting, especially since as many as 85% to 97% of hiring managers hire based on intuition, this opens the door for unconscious bias.
Interviews should help managers evaluate all candidates in a fair and balanced way, assessing them based on the same criteria. While you don’t have to strictly stick to a set of questions, especially when you connect well with a candidate, there should be a standard for fairness.
Hence, when it comes to interviews, have a clear and defined structure. Have a specific set of questions to ask every applicant. Assess candidates based on their answers.
Form a Diverse Interview Panel of Hiring Managers
When it comes to interviewing, you can also remove unconscious bias by composing a diverse interview panel. A diverse interview panel allows you to assess a candidate from a wider perspective. This gives you insight into how these candidates may work with different team members and how they may fit in with different teams.
This is especially important if the role you are hiring for works collaboratively across multiple teams often. What are others’ employee experiences going to be like with this candidate? That’s why it’s important to get a diverse set of opinions so that you can make a more informed decision.
Make the Application Process Fairer and Use Data
Some applications may require you to disclose your race, nationality, gender, age, education level, veteran status and other personal details. All of which may contribute to unconscious bias. CVs may also contain this information.
You can make your applications more fair or “blind” by removing this requirement and asking applicants to remove such details on CVs. You could also use a hiring platform that helps score applications based on skills and character such as TestGorilla. This allows you to use data in your hiring decisions.
Post-Interview Feedback and Calls
To make this a fair process, thank both candidates for their time. Call both candidates, even a candidate that was not chosen. Offer an explanation – everyone wants to improve! Make sure all candidates had a positive and fair interview and hiring experience by asking for feedback.
This makes it easier to recruit top-tier talent and keep top tier talent in your talent pool. When a position opens up again, you know who to go to!
The Importance of Hiring the Best Candidates
With the right approach and help from a team of experienced hiring managers, you can add top-tier talent to your team that not only adds a competitive advantage to your organization, but also leads to long-term employee satisfaction.
1. Customer Satisfaction
With the right team, you can prioritize overall customer satisfaction. A team of employees that feel supported and have access to everything that they need will undoubtedly lead to happy customers, which is key to the long-term success of your company.
2. Business Performance
We can think of no better way to achieve excellent performance throughout your business, than onboarding top-tier talent. Not only will an expert team contribute to the satisfaction of your customers, but also elevate the effectiveness of your daily processes to keep things running smoothly.
3. Happy Employees
Are you looking for new ways to create happier employees? By onboarding a team of industry experts who contribute to the overall company culture and satisfy customers, you're likely to build a team that is confident, rested and ready to take on new challenges.
Creating an exceptional employee experience begins with prioritizing the happiness of your employees. This could also be elevated with help from certain wellness programs, a comprehensive onboarding experience and prioritizing corporate culture.
4. Satisfied Business Leaders
While the happiness of your team is exceptionally important, it's imperative that you also consider the leaders within your company.
Without assistance from the right team of professionals, the leaders within your business risk being overworked, overwhelmed and not properly supported. With the right support from top-tier talent, they can place their focus on high-level items, prioritize business development and even elevate business outcomes, long-term.
By onboarding the right team of industry experts, the supervisors and managers within your company will have the dedicated help that they need, allowing them to effectively delegate to others and collaborate when needed.
Consider Your Existing Team When Hiring
Often when a company begins to hire, existing employees ask questions.
Is their job at risk? Are they underperforming? Is there a problem with their work?
Before you plan to hire, it may be helpful to communicate this decision with your team before posting the job listing or finding a team within the recruitment industry. This is where communication and transparency can come into play, along with an emphasis on employee recognition.
With the right approach to hiring, you can keep your existing team happy, productive and confident!
Onboard Your New Hire with Borderless
When faced with the difficult decision of choosing between two top-tier candidates, considering these ultimate tiebreakers can help you make a more informed choice. By evaluating their professional experience, cultural fit, and soft skills, you can determine which potential team member is the best fit for the position and the organization as a whole. Remember to carefully assess each candidate's qualifications and consider how they align with the specific needs and values of your company.
Contact Borderless Today and Onboard Your Top-Level Talent!
Once you have chosen your candidate, onboard with Borderless! Onboard, manage, and pay your international team with Borderless, the all-in-one platform for all your global hiring and payroll needs. Catch Borderless in action today and keep up to date with the latest news in HR with Borderless Insights!
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